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It’s gotten so big for a few years now there’s even been a name for it – schoolies week. Any older people who tag along and usually happen to be men also have a name – toolies.

Every year, more and more of the media follow around the schoolies looking for outrageous behaviour. Big surprise – they always find it.

Put any group under a massive amount of stress, then give them some cash and a holiday and it’s obvious what’s going to happen.

Some also go a bit more crazy than others.

However, with all this reporting of scantily clad nubile debauchery, what is the media really hoping to achieve?

If the point is to put a stop to it, that’s never going to happen. Not while all the schoolies destinations are making money out of it and the schoolies themselves are not causing too much trouble.

Even if schoolies on the Gold Coast were banned, it’d just move to a different location and similar sorts of partying is happening all the time, just without as much attention.

For example, take every Friday and Saturday night in Australia. And nightclubs. And music festivals. And house parties.

During my schoolies week, my friends and I avoided the big parties and went surfing. We celebrated our schoolies week over the following years at a place called university. Where it’s schoolies every night of the year.

One of the main headlines screamed by the schoolies coverage is Parents beware.

Maybe the current affairs programs and newspapers are so obsessed with schoolies because they hope that by raising awareness, the parents themselves will stop their children from being involved.

Despite or maybe because of all the attention these events get, however, they only seem to be getting more popular.

All this current in-depth focus purports to show us, “what really happens at schoolies week”.

Exposing and uncovering what goes on and to me it feels like a dirty old man with a video camera chasing around barely legal girls. The Bernard Tomic lap dance is a perfect example.

What’s currently being reported during schoolies week for the most part is disgusting and if you’re looking at it, sharing it, ogling it, you’re staring at just graduated children without their proper consent – you’re a true pig.

I find women attractive and I like looking at attractive women. What I try to avoid is looking that makes anyone uncomfortable, otherwise known as overt perving.

What I’m really not into is perving through my television at very young and probably intoxicated women whose decision-making faculties are impaired and not properly developed.

Parents probably have their suspicions of what happens at schoolies week. Really though, do they need to see it when there’s so little they can do to stop it?

When I started uni, I was involved in a few questionable situations and I wish I’d had a better idea of how to react.

I learnt quickly and luckily avoided anything I now regret. Thanks to my parents I’ve always had a high level of respect for women, but more information especially during my final years of school would’ve been more than welcome.

If anybody was actually interested in promoting responsible behaviour at schoolies week, there would be talks at the schools months in advance about how to behave, what to be wary of and how to deal with the range of difficult situations that may arise when mixing inexperience, drugs and alcohol.

I’m sure such programs already exist and I know that there are groups that attend schoolies events in order to help keep people safe.

So here’s an idea. Let’s go back to the general reports featuring numbers, and a few smiling faces, and mentioning of the odd criminal activity, and the joke stories where kids get cautions for selling contraceptive pills as ecstasy, and then that’s it.

Where is all this schoolgirl media porn going to stop? Is the next step camera crews heading out every weekend, to catch the hottest girls they can doing the craziest things they’re willing for the camera? All in order to ‘expose’ the debauchery of youth culture?

Instead get a lap dance, watch a porno, or maybe even start lusting after your partner. Just don’t get your jollies from the news, while pretending that there’s anything actually newsworthy about it.